Enhancing the Saliency of climate services for marine mobility Sectors in European Arctic Seas (SALIENSEAS)

The warming Arctic ocean has profound socio-economic consequences for local communities and various marine sectors. To make appropriate operational and strategic decisions to effectively adapt to the changing environment, stakeholders require more, and customised climate services.

Currently available high-quality Arctic climate information is very limited. In the SALIENSEAS project a team of social and natural scientists, met-ocean service personnel, and end-users will develop Arctic climate forecast products tailored to the existing needs of mobile marine industries. These products will be merged into Norway’s and Denmark’s met-ocean and sea-ice forecasting infrastructures, and maintained and developed beyond the lifetime of the project.

The project

The specific requirements of the end-users of Arctic climate information will be investigated (including their different interests, challenges, abilities, routines and decision-making contexts). While large public and private sector investments are currently made in the development of climate information for the Arctic region (observations, modelling, forecasting and integrating weather and climate information), the potential of these efforts for enhancing services for Arctic marine end-users is currently not realized. The aims of the project are to:

Understand the mobility patterns, constraints, challenges, decision-making contexts and information needs of end-users in different European Arctic marine sectors,

Develop weather and sea ice services and dissemination systems dedicated to Arctic marine end-users that are tailored to their key social, environmental and economic needs

The SALIENSEAS project will bring together a team of scientists, met-ocean service personnel, and end-users in a collaborative research and production process. Stakeholders and end-users will be directly involved in the project, both as advisors in the project management as well as respondents and participants in end-user workshops. We will adopt cutting edge and partly in-house developed concepts and methodologies to effectively produce knowledge and knowledge systems as an overall approach to the project, and as part of the work packages.

SALIENSEAS is organized in three work packages with the following themes:

Novel, customised climate products, based on user needs, will be developed by DMI (Denmark) and MET.no (Norway). The results and data will be made available to the public and maintained beyond the lifetime of the project.